Mobile World Congress - Featured Article

Comptel: Analytics Can Enable CSPs to Connect with Subscribers on an Emotional Level

Comptel, which is known for outfitting service providers with data collection solutions for billing, charging and fulfillment, is at Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) this week talking about how its carrier customers can collect and leverage information to better understand and serve their customers and their own interests.

A little more than a year ago, Comptel purchased Xtract. The addition of the analytics company to what Comptel already does in the area of data collection is a good match, says Ulla Koivukoski (News - Alert), Comptel’s senior vice president of marketing and communications. As a result, Comptel can now provide network operators with tools to help them understand the uniqueness of individual subscribers, and then quickly act on that information to lower customer churn, increase average revenue per subscriber, or otherwise meet a specific goal.

EMEA service provider Zain (News - Alert) is leveraging the Comptel solution to identify likely churn candidates and provide them with special offers before they express their intentions to drop service. In the past, Zain has responded to customers who voiced their intentions to leave by presenting them with special offers, says Koivukoski, “but that’s too late.” A better approach is to proactively look for such parameters as service inactivity or lower than normal service usage and then approach such customers with special offers in an effort to avoid churn, she says.

Bangladeshi service provider Robi is using the Comptel solution for similar purposes.

Churn is a big issue for all these operators, says Koivukoski, adding that churn and the resulting cost involved to retain new customers is a major expenditure for carriers. In some cases it can be 20 percent of their sales.

“It’s a big figure,” Koivukoski says. “So most CSPs are keen at looking ways they can prevent the churn -- not just predict it, but prevent it.”

In Barcelona this week, Comptel in its booth was showing a video of how a service provider can identify the particular interests of select groups of subscribers to provide them with specialized service bundles including LTE (News - Alert) connectivity and, potentially, content or special connectivity options to access certain content. This case study talks about a service provider identifying jazz fans by using location information to see who attended a jazz concert, tapping into those subscribers’ social network profiles to find friends with similar interests, and providing all of the above with bundled LTE service offerings.